I've followed this thinking wherever it has led me, which I'm sorry to say is into prose very much like what one would find in an academic journal article. So I'll apologize for that in advance, and make a concession that I learned from watching '300': this will not be quick, and (I fear) you will not enjoy it. (Also, there will be no pictures.)
The first thing to say is that 'racism' is a notoriously dodgy word, available as an all-purpose accusation despite - or, better, because of - our collective refusal to settle on a single meaning for it. On some accounts racism is prejudice plus power, which means that black people can't be racist (because we lack the capacity to influence social affairs in the broad, systematic way that, on this view, we'd need to make whatever biases we have rise to the level of racism proper). On other accounts racism is an irrational prejudice or unthinking aversion. On others it's a perfectly rational determination to exploit or exclude others for one's own advantage. On still others it's a matter of ill-will, or of some related vicious - that is, anti-virtuous - attitude. And on still others it's not an attitude but a belief system or ideology, a network of meanings that depict people of particular races in particular ways - as inhuman or inferior or ignoble or irremediably other or somehow at least potentially undeserving of the kind of regard or affection or respect we show people of some other race or races.
So accusations of racism don't do a lot of work in helping us understand what's wrong with something, because they typically fail to generate more light than heat. I'd rather just think about the potentially wrong-making features of the actions that CW (the tennis player, whose name I refuse to keep typing, deleting, and correcting) undertook. 'That's racist' should be the conclusion of an argument, not its beginning (much less its beginning, middle, and end). And the argument should show us how racial considerations are related to some state of affairs in a way that is inappropriate, impermissible, blameworthy, or otherwise ethically problematic.
The most plausible way to see CW's act as racist seems to go like this: She made fun of Serena's body; Serena's body is the sort of body that black women are more likely to have than other women; therefore she was making fun of black women, or of black women's bodies, and doing so because they are the bodies of black women. If anything is racist, this is.
But we need one of two things to make this argument go through. Either CW has to be thinking of Serena's body as a black woman's body, and this thought has to be part of her motivational set, or she has to be acting in conformity to a tradition that makes black women's bodies perpetually available for this sort of scrutiny and ridicule, no matter what she's thinking. The first condition seems unlikely to be met in the real world, and in any case involves the sort of thoughts we tend, in these halcyon post-civil rights days, to assume our interlocutors are not thinking. But to be sure, if CW was thinking I will make fun of this person because she is black and I hate black bodies, then she is surely a racist, and that's that.
CW might have entertained the right thoughts to make this accusation of explicit, intentional racism stick, but her behavior certainly doesn't make it obvious that she did. I suspect it's rather unlikely that she was thinking this way, and so I'm much more interested in the second route to the charge of racism. CW may not have consciously entertained any thoughts about blackness or black bodies or racial hierarchies, but she might still have acted under the unconscious influence of long-standing, still-vibrant traditions of racist practice and expression. If so, then the charge of racism is harder to avoid. Even if intentional, explicit racism is not in play, something else is - call it 'conforming racism'.
CW might have entertained the right thoughts to make this accusation of explicit, intentional racism stick, but her behavior certainly doesn't make it obvious that she did. I suspect it's rather unlikely that she was thinking this way, and so I'm much more interested in the second route to the charge of racism. CW may not have consciously entertained any thoughts about blackness or black bodies or racial hierarchies, but she might still have acted under the unconscious influence of long-standing, still-vibrant traditions of racist practice and expression. If so, then the charge of racism is harder to avoid. Even if intentional, explicit racism is not in play, something else is - call it 'conforming racism'.
If this second condition is met, if we are charging CW with conforming racism rather than explicit racism, then the charge is that CW is uncritically doing the work of a tradition of racist representation or performance. This means she is guilty of one of two things.
She might be guilty of the ethical equivalent of (the legal category of) negligence - she did not intend to engage in racist parody, but she did not do enough to avoid being read in that way. She should have known that her actions would be received in that way, and should have avoided it. Put more squarely in the language of (a kind of) ethics, she should have cultivated a more critical orientation to the contexts for her actions, to the conditions that make her actions meaningful. To the extent that she did not do this, she has made a moral error, and the racial dimension of this error makes it racist. This argument might leave us in the neighborhood of implicit bias research, if, say, CW didn't realize that her actions would be seen as racist because there's nothing special to her about racist parodies - they're parodies like any other. If that's right, it suggests that CW needs to rework the regime of associations that govern her mental life.
On the other hand, if you don't like the negligence-implicit bias argument, we could go consequentialist. We could say that CW is perpetuating a tradition of racist expression that will have bad consequences - it will reinforce racist-sexist antipathies against black women, it might inappropriately complicate the process by which black women and girls can cultivate the social good we call 'self-esteem,' and so on. Then we can criticize CW sort of indirectly, for being negligent with regard to these states of affairs, or directly, for failing to maximize utility. This argument leaves us in the neighborhood of social criticism, and suggests that we need a countervailing regime of public education - through schools, PSAs, or whatever - that disrupt the workings of racist systems of meaning.
I don't know CW and don't know how or what she thinks, but the virtue of both arguments from conforming racism is that they don't depend on knowing what the agent is thinking. On the consequentialist approach, no matter what she was thinking, her actions mean something publicly - they mean bad things publicly, and they help underwrite the persistence of discursive systems that enable those sorts of problematic public meanings. On the negligence approach, we are essentially inviting the agent to interrogate her own thinking: I don't know what you were thinking, we can say, but you might need to do some soul-searching. Or, better: you should've known better.
The arguments from conforming racism work better than the direct accusations of intentional, explicit racism. But I'm not sure that they work well enough. The charge of explicit racism works only if CW formed an intention - she is black and I will make fun of that - in a way that just seems unlikely. But the charge of negligent racism fares better only if there is something that CW either knew and ignored (that's actually recklessness) or if there's something she should have known but didn't. And I'm not sure if that works in this case.
Here's why: Serena Williams' body is not just a black female body, it's a body pretty radically unlike any other body on the women's tennis tour. This dissimilarity is overdetermined: it is unusual in its blackness, but also unusual in its (as one blogger on the subject put it) curviness. CW's impersonation was clearly not an impersonation of Venus, or for that matter of Zina Garrison. It wasn't just any black woman: it was that one. And so just as it isn't clear that Serena's blackness is what recommended her to CW as a target for poking fun, it isn't clear that her blackness is what makes her recognizable as the butt of the joke. So it isn't clear that CW should have known that her comedy act would be read as a comment on Serena's blackness. The joke did not depend on the blackness of Serena's body: it depended on the Serena-ness of it.
The consequentialist argument doesn't fare much better. It depends on empirical facts not in evidence - how do people in fact read CW's actions? Do her actions in fact -- to borrow and revise some language from the jurisprudence of sexual harassment -- help create a hostile living environment? We might set aside the facts and turn instead to probability estimates - estimates of how likely it is that CW's actions will reinforce racist ideas and undermine black female self-esteem. But these estimates depend on judgments about what other people are thinking or are likely to think. And this chain of predictions and inferences about social psychology seems pretty far from what we usually have in mind when we levy the charge of racism against someone.
Here's why: Serena Williams' body is not just a black female body, it's a body pretty radically unlike any other body on the women's tennis tour. This dissimilarity is overdetermined: it is unusual in its blackness, but also unusual in its (as one blogger on the subject put it) curviness. CW's impersonation was clearly not an impersonation of Venus, or for that matter of Zina Garrison. It wasn't just any black woman: it was that one. And so just as it isn't clear that Serena's blackness is what recommended her to CW as a target for poking fun, it isn't clear that her blackness is what makes her recognizable as the butt of the joke. So it isn't clear that CW should have known that her comedy act would be read as a comment on Serena's blackness. The joke did not depend on the blackness of Serena's body: it depended on the Serena-ness of it.
The consequentialist argument doesn't fare much better. It depends on empirical facts not in evidence - how do people in fact read CW's actions? Do her actions in fact -- to borrow and revise some language from the jurisprudence of sexual harassment -- help create a hostile living environment? We might set aside the facts and turn instead to probability estimates - estimates of how likely it is that CW's actions will reinforce racist ideas and undermine black female self-esteem. But these estimates depend on judgments about what other people are thinking or are likely to think. And this chain of predictions and inferences about social psychology seems pretty far from what we usually have in mind when we levy the charge of racism against someone.
I don't think CW (no patience to get the name right) was engaging in racism either. I think what may be more the root of the outrage is another example (from certain quarters) of the level of disrespect, hyper scrutiny or attention to difference that has plagued the Williams's sisters since they first joined the circuit. As Serena's "curviness" is from a mainstream perspective indistinguishable from her "racial" features, I can see where the assertion of racism comes from. This form of "curviness" is not automatically associated with non African descended women. But you are right the particularity of the jape is what saves it from accusations of racism. CW's towels are in recognition of Serena William's specific characteristics, these characteristics which underline her individual humanity as a distinguishing characteristic among her peers.
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